The Best Plugins and Tools for Food Bloggers with Andrew Wilder | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

One of the things I wanted to do with this podcast is to do kind of a annual check in on like, hey, here's some of the things that I see as valuable tools, plugins services, things like that. You mentioned WP Rocket as one of them that content creators should be aware of. So would you have a few that off the top of your head? Obviously every site's going to be different, it's not all going to be the same, but. But maybe a few that you could list off that would be important considerations and then a quick explainer for why those would be important. We can double click on any of them that would be worthy of a double click.

So I'm going to start with a simple one that most of readers probably already have. But if they don't, this is the first place to go is a good recipe plugin. So there are three good recipe plugins on the market. Tasty, which is brought to you by the same crew, Food Blocker Pro.

Disclaimer. We have a close connection to it.

Yeah, I think everybody probably knows that by now, but Tasty, WP Recipe Maker, and then Create, which is from mediavine. If you're not using one of those three, you do need to start. They're all excellent and it's sort of a matter of personal preference of do you like the templates, do you like the interface, do you like using it? They're all really good choices. Um, and if you're using multiple recipe plugins, you gotta work on consolidating because they do all add code to the site. So if you've got, you know, half your recipes in WP Recipe Maker and half in Tasty and you're moving over to Tasty, you need to accelerate that process, get them all moved over so you can remove the plugin you're not really using anymore and just streamline things a little bit.

And that's part of best practice with WordPress is how do you have as few plugins as possible while not having so few that you're missing out on essential features? Can you talk about why that's an important piece to not just like randomly install plugins?

Absolutely. So plugins, the idea of a plugin is it adds a feature of some kind to WordPress. It could be a really tiny plugin that has like one line of code, or it could be a really huge plugin that's like a full E Commerce shopping cart system. And plugins can add stuff either on the back end of the site or the front end, or both. A lot of Plugin developers aren't paying attention to things like site speed. They don't care. So they're going to load like 10 different javascripts on the front end of your site. And if those things are really important to your site, then that's great. But if you're like, hey, I want to be able to sell one ebook on one page, you don't want that shopping cart system adding weight to all 2000 other pages on your site unnecessarily. So being judicious with the plugins is really important. When we onboard a new client, we actually do a plugin audit. So we just look through all the plugins and say, hey, what things are not being used? What do you have two plugins doing the same thing that we can consolidate what plugins should you have? And so we kind of go through and just try to optimize and clean things up. So I'd say at least once a year just go to the plugins page and look through and see what you're not using and get rid of it.

Yeah, that's great. So recipe plugin, obviously, if you're a recipe blogger, do you work with any how to sites like Home Improvement diy? We are starting to focus on a new site. I don't think we've connected with you in this Andrew, but we acquired a site called Curbly which is Home Improvement DIY craft kind of content. And one of the things that we're going to start focusing on with that is how to. And we're actually looking at building a plugin around that for WP Tasty. But do you have, I know that Create maybe does a version of that. Do you know other ones that are in that category? And, and then can you talk about what's actually happening from the code side for plugins like how to or Recipe?

Sure. So the reason you need to use a recipe plugin, it's not just to make it look pretty for your visitors. What it does on the back end in the code is it creates what's called recipe schema. And so there's this specific code markup that basically says, hey Google, these are the ingredients, these are the steps, this is the image. And there's all this code that makes it crystal clear to Google, hey, these are all the features of the recipe. So Google can scan that or other tools can scan that and basically know all the information. That's what Google uses for all the rich snippets in the search results. So when it shows the picture or the ratings or the time Stuff like that. It's actually pulling that from the schema in the code, not on the front end of the page. So there's basically a standardized recipe schema that all these plugins generate. So how to is another type of schema. There's dozens and dozens of different schema. So how to is basically very similar to recipe. Right. Because it's. You're going through and doing these steps, but it's slightly different. So you'll have like step number one, step number two. You know, I haven't dug into the how to schema, but it's going to basically be identical. So. And I know in WP Recipe Maker, you can say something as a How to. Like, you can just toggle that on your recipe and still use it. You know, if you're like, if you are generally a recipe blogger, but you're going to craft something with food, but it's not really edible, you know, like you're making Christmas decorations out of.

Yeah. Or dog treats. Yeah.

Yes. You don't want to call that a recipe. Like a recipe should just be for food for humans.

Yeah.

That's Google's official policy on that. So that's where you can, you can flip the switch and make it a How to. By the way, I think you're going to have to call it WP Crafty.

Yeah, totally. Well, it would be tasty Crafty. That's what it would be. That's our naming mechanism. Or we'll have to. It'll be a new branch, there'll be wpt. This is what you're saying. WP Tasty. WP Crafty. Like those would be the two differentiators DVD on the naming. Super helpful context. One of the things that I learned that was kind of interesting about Web3, a lot of people are talking about Web3, which is like crypto blockchain, you know, cyberpunks or whatever they are. But there was a little bit of momentum around structured data schema being the original web3. Like the idea was like, hey, this is going to be the new iteration of the Internet is kind of everything schema, structured data to put, to wrap content, to wrap kind of identifiers around content. And I think like Web3 for that kind of fizzled. And now there's like Web3v2, which is kind of the cryptocurrency world, which is kind of interesting but really important and important to understand kind of the why behind that. So recipe plugin, obviously, if you're a recipe blogger, then there's also the SEO world. And there's plugins for that. Would Yoast be the recommendation and one that you see the most?

Yep, absolutely. Yoast is still our number one recommendation. They have a free version if you're just getting started. That's perfect. They also have a paid version and that has a few additional features that are really nice, such as the orphaned content filter, which can tell you basically, hey, there are no other pages on your site linking to this particular page. You should probably add an internal link. So that's a really powerful tool. But on all my personal sites, I use the free version and it's fantastic.

Cool. So that's Yoast SEO. How about caching? What is caching? And then what should people do when it comes to caching on their site in terms of plugins and services?

So caching is basically storing a copy of your content. It's C, A, C, H, E. And I will say caching is really hard. We actually joke internally at NerdPress that caching is hard. Like, we whine about it. So much so that I actually had whiskey glasses made up that are etched on the side that says caching is hard.

Like, take a shot whenever you're just really struggling through it. Yeah.

So it can be very complicated. But the idea is when somebody goes to a WordPress site, WordPress will generate the page and send it back to them. And generating that page takes time and resources. And so the idea of a cache is you save a copy of that generated page, and then the next person that comes along, your server, will send them that copy. So you're storing a cache of that content. So that's how high traffic sites can really get a lot of traffic, serve all the content without crashing the server because it can't keep up with the demand. So our favorite caching plugin is WP Rocket. So WP Rocket doesn't do just page optimization, but it also does page caching. It actually started primarily with that. So it's storing all these copies of the page so that alone speeds things up. And then WP Rocket also does these on page optimizations to help with things like Core Web Vitals, where it'll like, defer your JavaScript or lazy load your images and all those other kind of bells and whistles features. So WP Rocket is sort of this whole package plugin that adds all of these features to help your site run more smoothly.

And what about. Do you use both of those in tandem? Do you. Could you do just one of them? What does it look like to do the plugin caching within WordPress and the service like Cloudflare, that would be separate from that. How does that interact? And that feels like a point where you take out that shot class and be like, caching is hard. Yes.

And so Cloudflare is a separate service that is a content distribution network and a firewall, and technically it's a proxy service. What that means is that instead of a visitor going straight to your website, the visitor goes through a Cloudflare server and then from that it goes to your website. So if my server is in Chicago, let's say, and I'm in Los Angeles, and if I don't have Cloudflare, my browser is going to request the page directly from my server in Chicago. And, you know, data on the Internet travels almost the speed of light, so it's pretty quick. But that still could add like 50 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds round trip to say, you know, for the, for my request to travel all the way to Chicago and then the answer to travel all the way back to me in Los Angeles.

And within that. This is an interesting point that I think a lot of people don't realize. When you have a server, your server is essentially a computer. And when you type in a URL, it's essentially your computer calling another computer to get the information that's on that computer. It's kind of like me typing an email and sending it. It's like sending it to your computer. Right. That's not exactly how it works, but it's similar in terms of you saying pinch of yum dot com. If there was was no caching, we didn't have a cdn, it would be going to wherever that location is, getting the information coming back. Putting those images on my computer, putting those words on my computer from a file in folders that were on that server. Is that more or less correct?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's easy to forget that like your, your website is actually on a physical computer in a data center somewhere, like in a warehouse building, behind locked doors, you know, with lots of cable around and fire suppression systems. Like, there's actually like a room full of servers that's actually literally serving your website.

Yep. And so the, the Cloudflare portion of it is. You talked about a CDN and, and kind of the different components of Cloudflare. How much of that do you need to understand intricately versus just know, like, this is generally what's happening?

Well, I think it's helpful to have the general concept in your head. You don't need to Know the nitty gritty like. But to understand kind of conceptually how it works, I think is helpful. So, so if we add Cloudflare to the mix, what happens is Cloudflare has like 200 data centers around the world. And the reason they have so many is they want them to be close to users. So they have a Los Angeles data center. Right. So if, if I have Cloudflare on my site, but my server's still in Chicago, when I type in eatingrules.com, let's say my computer is actually going to go to the Los Angeles Cloudflare data center, which is very close. So it might take 5 milliseconds to get the data instead of 50 right now. Cloudflare then says, hey, Andrew's requested eatingrules.com do we have a copy of that?

No.

Okay, I'm going to go back to Andrew's server in Chicago, get a copy of the homepage, bring it back, and then serve it back to Andrew. After that, Cloudflare is going to store a copy of that page or the image or whatever it is, and then the next person that comes along is going to get that copy. Where it gets a little tricky is actually the example I just gave is a little more complex because I was talking about the page, not just some of the static assets like images and scripts. Caching that stuff is really hard. And you can't do that on a Cloudflare. You can't do that reliably on a Cloudflare free plan. It should be really complex and challenging to keep, keep it all straight. So one of the things, one of the things we do with our services, we're actually a Cloudflare enterprise partner, which is their highest level of service. And we've got a lot of custom code in place that will cache the pages themselves. So often people who are requesting your site, the request never even makes it back to your home server because Cloudflare has got it all cached.

Yes. At all. Yeah, that makes sense. And the difference between a Cloudflare service and WP Rocket is WP Rocket is doing all code based stuff on your, but it doesn't have those data centers, it doesn't have the capability to store things. And that's why Cloudflare has a paid services, because to your point, there's 200 data centers, there's all these computers, there's storage costs, there's upkeep costs. So just good to differentiate between those two. Obviously we could do an entire podcast series on patching, so just something that's worth noting and worth mentioning. But want to hit some other plugins that you think are important? Any others that are on your list that would be worth mentioning.

I want to give a shout out to the Feast plugin. I think many of you are probably using one of the Feast themes, Foodie Pro, for example, or Brunch Pro. But Skyler has in recent years pushed all of his development efforts into the plugin instead of the theme, because that way plugins are very easy to update and themes are hard to update. And so he's been rolling out features regularly. So as things evolve, he's adding features left and right. And so if you have the Feast plugin, you can just turn on a better menu, or you can build a better recipe index or your modern homepage. So Skyler is really actively developing it. We work with him, we talk with him all the time about features. And one of the things that's great about Skyler is like, he'll roll something out and if it's not ideal, he'll change it and improve it. So he's really on top of best practices. He's talking to Casey Markey and getting best SEO advice there. And it's like, hey, what's the best thing to do for food blogs specifically? And so if you're not using the Feast plugin now, I'd recommend it first of all. But if you're not, you're gonna have to do a little more homework on what are the best practices and a little more research on your own.

Yeah, and that's one of the great things about working. Feast Plugin being an example, NerdPress being an example. Working with somebody who is kind of sleeps, eats, breathes, this industry is you can really fulfill the concept that I talk a lot about on the podcast, which is who, not how. And I think to a degree, as creators, we need to know how, But I think more important is who. So when it comes to technology and plugins and WordPress, there's one option, which is how, how do you do this? How do you do caching? How do you do core web vital optimization, site speed optimization? Or there's who, which is like NerdPress being a great example and you being a great example of that. So for the people who are listening to this podcast, I would encourage you to think about that concept, who, not how. I think you have to have a working knowledge. To your point, Andrew, like, you need to know generally what a CDN is, but I don't think it's the responsibility of a creator. To know the intricate details of like the fine tuning of those things. So great opportunity to. To think about that just in our work in general, who not how. And also a little plug for NerdPress. Any other, any other plugins that you would think of or things that would be worth mentioning in terms of the world of recipe and search. Knowing that there's literally an unlimited number of plugins that people could work with. Any other ones that would be worth highlighting.

Nothing's jumping to the top of my head, but a couple of plugins conceptually are jumping in my head to say don't use. I think anything that bogs things down that doesn't really add value to your visitors can be challenging. Like, Google has a plugin. I'm totally spacing on what it's called. It's like the Google WordPress plugin. And they tried to roll in all their features and it pulls in like.

Analytics, Google Search Console.

And it's not a bad plugin. But for food, blogs are so competitive that we really need to streamline as much as possible and make sure the only features that we're using are the ones we need. So I just, I think maybe the best way to put it is think about what's nice to have versus what is need to have. And then if it's something that's just nice to have, is there another way to get you what you need or want without bogging down your site?

And nice with that, if you can find a way to do that without going into WordPress, like for the Google example, like you have Google Analytics, you have Google Search Console. Like it just requires you to log into those services. And it might not be quite as integrated, but the nice thing is it's separate. Like it's another thing that's not putting code into your WordPress site. So there's an emphasis on clean, minimal, but also essential code on your site. So you're not bogging it down, which I think is important to keep in mind.